being an entrepreneur demands a mental operating system that most ppl don’t have, but it can be learned if willing!
AUG 15, 2026
Last year I made a business mistake that cost me around $30,000.
Those of you who have been with me for a while know that 2025 was a fuckery of a year for me. So many things blew up and fell apart. In hindsight, all for the best! But this is one that I haven’t shared until now.
Most of the stories I read about entrepreneurship are about someone who had an idea, followed their intuition, took a risk, and, conveniently, the risk paid off. The stories I read less often are the ones where you have the particularly humbling moment when everything you have poured countless hours into falls apart.
I brought someone on board to help me build a specific and fairly innovative arm of my business. They had experience in an area I knew very little about, which was one of the reasons I wanted to work with them. As a person, they were genuinely lovely. They wanted to contribute something positive and held a vision of what we could create if we could bring our skills together.
The mistake I made was that I invested in their potential rather than what they were actually capable of doing. (Ever done that with a man? I have… Never again!)
I gave them extensive business mentoring and resources. I gave them a $2,000 business course to get them up to speed. I shared things I had learned through more than a decade of running my own businesses. I tried to give context, perspective, support, ideas, structure. I thought that if I could give them enough of the information they needed, we could close the gap between where they were and where I could see the business going.
Over the nine months we worked together what became increasingly obvious was that we were operating from two completely different mental operating systems. They were approaching the business with an employee mindset, and I was expecting an entrepreneurial one.
I don’t write that as a criticism. I get it. Almost everything about the way we are educated and socialised to work prepares us to be employees. We learn to complete tasks. We learn to demonstrate effort. We learn that being busy is a sign of importance and that if we work hard enough, somebody else will eventually notice and reward us. There is usually a structure around us, a job description, a boss, a set of expectations, a ladder, a system we can become competent within.
Entrepreneurship is much stranger than that.
There is no job description because you are making the job. No boss is telling you which problem matters most. There is no promotion waiting for you because you have worked hard for three years. There is no one to tell you that the thing you have spent six months building is not actually what anyone wants.
You have to develop a different relationship with uncertainty, money, visibility, responsibility, failure, time, your own ego, and perhaps most importantly, reality.
I learned an enormous amount from that experience, although I would have preferred the education to cost me less. Let me share seven entrepreneurial operating system shifts that make the biggest difference in a business that works vs one that doesn’t.
1. your focus must be on value, not effort
If you are working hard and not making money or making a difference, you have an expensive hobby, not a business.
Towards the end of our nine months together, when the cracks had become too evident to ignore, they sent me a lengthy document attached to an email detailing all the tasks they had completed. It made me laugh because that wasn’t the issue. The problem was that none of their effort had moved the needle forward in any quantifiable way.
This is one of the biggest psychological shifts you have to make when you move from employment into entrepreneurship: effort is not the same thing as value. We have been culturally trained to believe that working hard is inherently virtuous, and most workplaces reward you for being busy, useful and good at completing the things you have been asked to do.
Entrepreneurship is less sentimental: Did someone buy? Did the audience grow? Did the offer get better? Did this make money or create impact?
Some valuable work is slow and invisible, of course, but you need to become ruthlessly interested in the relationship between what you are doing and what it is actually creating. Otherwise you can spend an extraordinary amount of time working very hard on things that don’t matter.
2. you have to develop an expansive relationship with money
I know “abundance mindset” has become one of those internet phrases that can make you want to throw your phone/laptop out of a window, but what I mean is this: you cannot build a spacious business while making every decision from fear.
In one of our weekly calls, I noticed that many of the solutions being offered were coming from scarcity: fear that someone would steal our intellectual property, fear that something would fall into the wrong hands, fear around pricing, fear about giving too much away. They began to criticise things they had never done because they were afraid. I could see that their fear was beginning to shape the business. When you believe there isn’t enough, you protect before you create. You hold things tightly. You undercharge. You overthink. You make access difficult. You wait until you are certain.
Entrepreneurship asks you to do almost the opposite. You have to put something into the world before you know exactly what will come back. You have to risk being seen, risk someone saying no, spend money before you know precisely what it will return, and trust that there will be another idea, another client, another opportunity if this one doesn’t work.
An entrepreneur knows that there is always risk and is generous enough in spirit to participate anyway.
3. everything is information
We had two launches that didn’t work out, and I could see that they were devastated, suffered greatly and took it personally. One of the most expensive mistakes you can make in business is confusing an outcome with identity.
I explained to them that every time something doesn’t work, it’s simply information guiding us towards what does. If only you knew the number of times I have ‘failed’ in my life! But this is part of the fun. It’s not failure in my eyes. It’s redirection. It’s so good because it refines your work and your offerings. Failure grows you as a person, which is welcome. Shrinking from that means shrinking from your own evolution.
Entrepreneurs understand that nothing is personal and there is always room for growth and improvement. This is not a reason to lose momentum and stall because it can destroy the entire thing.
4. authenticity has a way of attracting the right people and opportunities
One of the reasons I brought this person on board was because they had experience in a field I didn’t, and I wanted to enter that world in a disruptive, innovative and culturally aware way. But they didn’t trust themselves or the business enough to do that, and so they kept trying to fit what we were building into a structure that wasn’t made for us. Which meant we kept being excluded because we weren’t actually being ourselves.
You have to have your own back enough to make something that doesn’t quite fit the existing category. You have to tolerate the uncomfortable phase where nobody has confirmed that you are right yet. And you have to trust that the more specific and recognisably you your business becomes, the easier it becomes for the right people to see it.
Entrepreneurs understand that the more authentic you become, the easier it is to find the people you’re meant to connect with. Those connections can open doors that may never have existed otherwise.
5. you need to be okay with having a low-status life to have a high-value one
You have to be okay with having a career that people don’t understand. Get your ego out of the way. The highest-status thing you can do is decide that you don’t care very much about status.
We live in a culture where work is not simply what we do to make money. It is one of the ways we communicate status, intelligence, ambition, education and usefulness. Title, salary, company, credentials and job description can be shorthand for understanding where you sit. Entrepreneurship removes that shorthand, and you have to be willing to let it.
I personally never use the terms “life coach” or “business coach” because neither quite describes what I do. Nor do I say “therapist” even though technically I could because of my psychology background. I say writer, mentor or artist and only elaborate when someone is genuinely interested. I have had to become comfortable with the fact that my work isn’t always immediately legible, because I would rather have a life that is genuinely mine than a career that is impressive to people I don’t know.
6. you have to set your own personal boundaries around what you are available for and when you work
So many people repeat the same systems they are trying to extract themselves from. They leave traditional employment because they want freedom and then recreate the exact same system inside their own business. You don’t have to do that!
It goes back to number 1 in this list, where you have to figure out what actually creates value. I love using the 80/20 Pareto principle here, where you spend time defining what 20% of your efforts create 80% of the results and value.
A big part of that is waking up to the idea that anything that sacrifices your peace, joy and fulfilment isn’t worth it. Instead, choose yourself! Choose what makes life worthwhile. Trust me, it’s enough.
7. your business is a living, breathing entity that you are here to guide, not control
Something has to end whenever we enter a new chapter of life. The biggest thing that needs to die when you become an entrepreneur is the illusion that you are in control.
Businesses are like children. You dream them up, birth them, give them a few steady years of foundations, and then you have to start paying attention to who they actually are rather than trying to make them become what you imagined. Your customers will tell you what they want. Your sales will tell you what is working. Your boredom will tell you what has reached its natural end. The idea you can’t stop thinking about will tell you where you want to go next.
You have to start where you’re at. Build from there. The person I had brought on last year had a big vision she wanted to execute, but didn’t understand it had to be built step by step on a foundation of proven success. They wanted to jump ahead of the game without building on something, and of course it didn’t work.
Your business will show you how it wants to evolve. You generally don’t need more strategy, advice or ideas. You need support to do what you already know you need to do, and enough space to actually do it.
This is the space I made COWORK for.
If you see yourself in the points above, are growing your entrepreneur mindset and have something you want to work on, you’ll enjoy participating in my 2-month COWORK live business mentoring program with me. Cowork is designed to help you turn your ideas and raw energy into something tangible in a community of like-minded women building businesses alongside you.
You’re likely facing the normal challenges that are part of doing deep soul work. Together, we work through the energetics and internal resistances that arise across the three practical stages every sustainable business is built on:
COMMIT → MARKET → SELL
Cowork is for you if you have ideas, skills, and something meaningful to offer the world but the gap between what you know you’re capable of and what you’ve created so far feels wider than you’d like.
With me, Vienda, a type-B founder with over a decade of experience, as your guide.
This is probably the part of entrepreneurship I like most now: not the fantasy of arriving at the perfect business, but the strange, ongoing relationship between the person you are and the thing you are making. The business grows, and you grow, and sometimes you outgrow each other, and sometimes you discover that the things you thought weren’t working are actually trying to lead you somewhere else that is meant to be.